External Microbeam line

Responsible scientist: Noelia Maldonado Gavilán

The external microbeam line offers the opportunity of working in non-vacuum conditions by allowing light beams to be extracted to air.

This feature is of strong interest for biomedical applications such as preclinical studies in proton-therapy, proton range verification or activation of contrast agents that might be liquid. Moreover, working outside a vacuum chamber is really appreciated when the samples are large or are considered cultural heritage. This is the reason why many experiments of ion beam analysis in art and archaeology research have been done in this beamline.

The beamline offers two configurations for extracting the beam to air. The first one is mainly used in archaeometry studies or on the experiments where small beams (~250 µm) are mandatory. In this configuration, the beam is extracted from the vacuum line through a 100 nm thick Si₃N₄ window. The second configuration aims at achieving larger beam diameters (~1 cm) and it is optimal for cell irradiations or experiments where full samples are irradiated. In this configuration, the beam is extracted through a 25 µm thick Kapton window.

The beamline is equipped with a motorized platform having an active area of 40×40 cm² for mounting the required setups. The setup for ion beam analysis is permanently available at the beamline. It includes two X-ray detectors for the PIXE technique, a silicon implanted blind detector for RBS and a gamma detector for PIGE. The beamline allows to generate a helium stream to optimize the detection of the X-rays in the range 1.0–12 keV.